With time
With the time (English original title The Care of Time ) is the title of a novel by Eric Ambler from 1981. The book tells in the style of a political thriller the story of an American ghostwriter who, under obscure circumstances, receives an order from a middleman, NATO To make the offer of a paranoid ruler from the Arab Emirates to a military cooperation with the West, in which he offers the construction of a military base near the Strait of Hormuz , ostensibly to counter the growing Soviet influence in the Middle East . It is the last novel written by Ambler, but it was viewed rather critically in the media.
content
The background to the story is the Cold War era , the armament of the power blocs at the time and the further development of Arab-Palestinian terrorism.
Robert Halliday is an American ghostwriter well-known in the scene who writes autobiographies for prominent people in current affairs according to their wishes. One day, under turbulent circumstances, he received an offer to write a book based on an allegedly recovered manuscript from the 19th century. The text is said to come from the Russian anarchist and terrorist-inclined revolutionary Sergei Gennadijewitsch Netschajew . But this offer is only a bait so that Halliday might not turn it down despite the high payment. It comes, underpinned by the sending of a serious parcel bomb, from the Estonian businessman Karlis Zander, who, especially in the Middle East , acts as a front man and mediator for economic deals, corruption money and political agreements for the Arab rulers there .
However, Zander and his family are on the murder list of a professional killer company that reliably fulfills the contracts concluded for totalitarian and autocratic Arab rulers in the Middle East and the Gulf region for high pay. Karlis Zander is now supposed to offer, on behalf of a paranoid-schizophrenic ruler , a wealthy oil sheikh, with fear of impotence and the growing oldness of NATO through Halliday, to build a military base on his territory because the Soviet influence in the area has assumed threatening proportions for the ruler have. He is also afraid of nuclear war and suffers from asthma. Halliday is now to negotiate with representatives of NATO. In return, Zander hopes for protection in the USA for himself and his family, who are already living there, from the assassinations of the service company Mukhabarat-Zentrum .
Since the neighboring rulers in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia are not allowed to find out about the ruler's plans because they consider him crazy, negotiations between NATO and the ruler are to take place under conspiratorial circumstances in the abandoned silver mine in Austria that he has already bought . There the ruler, who is plagued by allergies, allegedly wants to set up a palatial sanatorium for himself and rich people from the Arab world in the dust-free air of the mine. The meeting is to be disguised as a television interview so that nobody gets suspicious. Then it turns out, however, that the ruler himself commissioned the murder in order to liquidate Zander after he had finished his job, because the real reason is that the ruler wants to build a private fortress with a nuclear bunker in the Styrian silver mine because he wants to build one Third world war feared. That should be the consideration for the building permit of the NATO base.
Structure and language
Over time , a preliminary remark in the form of a quotation from a text attributed to the Russian revolutionary and nihilistic anarchist Sergei Gennadijewitsch Nechayev: "Over time ..." writes Nechayev about the fear of getting old, "... becomes natural we're all running out of breath. " The book has 15 chapters and 413 pages in the 1983 edition of Diogenes.
Ambler's language is partly sarcastic, with cynical expressions, but mostly consists of the fine ironic humor characteristic of the author. The story also uses the usual thriller elements, such as chases, showdowns and other means of increasing tension, but the main thing is that the characters follow a logical course of action.
Editions and filming
The English original edition was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London in 1981. Hans Hermann provided a translation into German for Diogenes Verlag , which published the novel in paperback in 1983 and as a hardback in 1991 with a title drawing by Tomi Ungerer . A new edition, newly translated by Matthias Fienbork, came out in 2000.
1990 appeared for the novel The time runs off (English original title: The Care of Time ) based on a script by Eric Ambler and Alan Seymour . John Davies directed. However, the television film was taken from British television in the run-up to the Second Gulf War .
reception
In its edition of November 30, 1981, Der Spiegel published a review and wrote: “... the plot fails because of Halliday's unintended revelations, and with it, Ambler, who ends up with the overly complicated intrigue, ends up with no surprise coup Hands slides. A big disappointment for Ambler fans. "
Other newspapers also refer to the novel as one of Ambler's weaker works at the time, but reader reviews are still mostly positive today.